So here I am in April 1989 out of a job for the first time in my life. I have always worked for someone since I left school in Scotland in 1952.
A new experience and a very strange one. But I am not alone. Throughout NZ tens of thousands were out of work. Actually 147,000 to be more exact. Rogernomics had bitten and things would get worse. David Lange quit that year. All that great promise gone, up in smoke, a dead parrot. Greed and materialism had replaced hope and optimism. The Labour Party had betrayed working people and left many on the scrapheap.
It would get worse in the years to come.
As for me? The complete enormity of what was happening had not really penetrated my thick skull. I had no debts some money saved and I was quite convinced that my new status as an unemployed person was only temporary.
And so it proved to be.
Kimihia was behind me and I was free as. For the next few months I breezed along not making any attempt to conserve my resources. Life was good and I would soon find work. But to find work you have to look and I was not looking.
No worries. After all I was a TV Drama person and work would fall into my lap. My capacity for such delusional thinking was without limit.
What I had not taken into account was the startlingly obvious truth that hardly anyone outside of the TV bubble knew what a producer was.
No worries mate.
But the phone rang one day and it was a job. The caller was Jill Wilson (a friend(but soon not to be such) and former co-worker in the drama dept and other places. Jill was working on a new Brian Edwards show, titled ‘Missing’, about reuniting folks with there lost loved ones.) Sound familiar? They needed a director for location work, moving around the country interviewing various people. I was stoked it was something I had considerable experience of.
It was a small crew. Myself, a journalist/researcher, cameraperson, and sound recordist. Perfect.
There were two journalists Kerry Woodham and Susan lei’ataua.
I had worked with Susan (nowadays known as Susana) on Shark in the Park where she had played a nurse in one of my episodes. Kerry I knew but not so well, however she was a denizen of Avalon and our paths had crossed. I had no idea that she would one day be speaking through the same bullhorn as Mike Hosking and peddling the same sensationalist crap as that rather loathsome creature.
Susana on the other hand has a better handle on NZ affairs and works on National Radio as a presenter/interviewer/newsreader. She lived for sometime in the USA, New York I think, and was involved in various types of contemporary theatre and experimental drama. Also teaching on those subjects if I recall accurately.
Two women on radio with quite diverging viewpoints.
So I spent the remainder of the year swanning around complete with leather jacket getting on and off ferries and planes, eating out and generally acting the fool. What a tosser!!!!!!
See you in the soup.
Youth unemployment was especially high at the time. I remember going to parties and people would ask things like "how do you spend your time?" rather than "what do you do?" since unless you were a student (as I was) then there was a good chance you didn't "do" anything.
Good cliffhanger by the way, in the next episode we find out where being a tosser leads?